Probation Officer #203: Endgames 12

Posted on April 21, 2014 by jaime

“Ana. Ana girl. I’m not avoiding you.” She looked at me. I said, “All right. The truth is that I’m hurting a little. Maybe more than a little. I miss Sa’afia, what do you expect? And you’re caught up in that, a little. Which is my fault, not yours.” I wasn’t sure if that last bit was true. Ana might have a lot to do with Sa’afia leaving. Or she might not. Neither of them were talking.

“Are you doing anything tonight?”

“Going to bed. Um, alone.”

Ana sniffed. “After work?”

“Okay. I’ll see you at The Longshoreman. Six o’clock good for you?”

Ana nodded. “I’ll see you there.” She seemed less happy about it than I’d expected. Nor did she leave. “Jaime.”

“Ana?”

“Sa’afia told you about my Dad, didn’t she?”

“Yes. It wasn’t her fault. I made her.”

“I’ll bet.” She grinned. “You beat it out of her.”

“Something like that.”

“He’s in town.”

Probation Officer #202: Endgames 11

Posted on April 20, 2014 by jaime

I took Ana into my office. I sat down. She didn’t. She stood looking down at me, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She clutched her phone without looking at it.

I looked at her. I wanted to tell her to sit down, but I had another appointment in half an hour. She’d stay longer if she sat. “Ana, we don’t have an appintment, and you need one. But I can give you twenty minutes. Wha’d you want?”

Ana breathed three times through her nose, hard. It didn’t help. “Why are you avoiding me?”

“I’m not avoiding you. Look, you’re nearly done with probation. I have to spend more time with people who are…” – I waved my hands vaguely – “who need me more.”

“Bullshit. I mean, yeah, that might be true. But we’re friends. You were my … You were Sa’afia’s boyfriend. And now you’re treating me like you don’t know me.”

“No, I’m not.” But I was.

“You’re punishing me. Much worse than you ever punished Sa’afia.” Her eyes were welling with tears. She’d found an injustice. She was the victim of an injustice! But I saw myself in her eyes. I didn’t like me.

Probation Officer #201: Endgames 10

Posted on April 18, 2014 by jaime

After I’d told Jock what had happened, I called Seth McGuinness. McGuinness isn’t important in this story: he’s just an honest detective who was working night shift at the time. I didn’t know him, but Jock did, and told me to call him.

McGuinness heard me out, and said that technically Curnow wouldn’t be a missing person, if he disappeared, for another day or two. But in practice the cops would be looking out for him, starting now. He made a joke about Jock, so I made one about Maynard. I was grinning when I hung up.

McGuinness turned out to be the first cop I actually chose to talk to from time to time, for the fun of it. And because it was useful to have an ally over on their side. But as I said, that’s not in this story.

The next morning I was at work early, because I hadn’t slept well. Ana was there at reception, waiting for me.

Probation Officer #200: Endgames 9

Posted on April 13, 2014 by jaime

My house seemed quiet, if not entirely safe, once Curnow had gone. I finished the whisky I’d poured myself, wondering what had just happened. It seemed, though, that I believed Curnow, when he claimed that he hadn’t planted the baggie of coke in Ana’s room.

When he’d gone into Ana’s place he’d probably brought along a baggie of his own, ready to plant, but he’d found that one. He could take it into the station feeling like an honest cop.

And I’d convinced Curnow that I hadn’t put that baggie in Ana’s room for him. He’d decided that I was more Machiavellian than I ever really managed, and that if I’d planted the drugs I’d have had six different ways of proving that I didn’t. Since I didn’t have anything, I must have been thinking that Curnow had planted the baggie. I could only think that if it hadn’t been me.

What was odd was how much that scared Curnow. I should probably be scared too, but I didn’t know who I should be scared of. I didn’t know anyone apart from Curnow who’d want to plant drugs on Ana. Or had it been to catch Curnow?

If Ana was the target, I was probably in danger too. If Curnow was the target, I probably wasn’t. Not that that helped at all.

Curnow was a nasty man, but he was far from stupid. If he’d thought he was in danger, maybe he was right. If something happened to him and they re-traced his steps, they’d probably find out that he’d visited me. I didn’t want to be the person last known to have seen Curnow alive.

It was nearly midnight, a bad time to call anyone. Jock wouldn’t be happy if I called the cops before I’d spoken to him. He wouldn’t be happy to hear from me at all, of course. For a second I considered a long distance call to Samoa, to talk to Sa’afia. I rejected calling Ana just as quickly. Poor Jock. I called him.

Probation Officer #199: Endgames 8

Posted on April 12, 2014 by jaime

Curnow stood up, but he walked away from me. He muttered, “shit.”

“Well, I didn’t have any coke to plant. I never have coke around. It’s boring. So there’s that.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Curnow was staring out my window.

“Still, I s’pose I could have gone out and got some. If none of you guys were watching me. And I could’ve put it under the floorboard after Jane had taken her photo. She probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

“You really got nothing? You didn’t even prepare a story?” There was nothing out my window, just a porch, a hedge, and the sides of the neighbours’ houses. You could hardly see the street. Curnow didn’t want me to see that I’d scared him. That only made sense if he was telling the truth.

“If it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you … You’re in the shit, aren’t you?” I was still puzzled. Curnow wasn’t.

He didn’t look at me. “Thanks for the whisky.” He was already leaving, walking fast. He closed the front door quietly.

Probation Officer #198: Endgames 7

Posted on April 11, 2014 by jaime

“What, you’re saying you didn’t plant that dope on Ana? Bullshit.”

“And you think that if you act me some disbelief, that’s going to make me think you didn’t? That’s bullshit.”

“Oh, come on. It was you. I know it and you have to know it. But if it wasn’t you, that’d at least make it interesting. So we’ll pretend it wasn’t you and see where it goes. Well, it wasn’t Ana. Jane Siebel and I both saw that gap in the floorboards and there was nothing in there. The same day you found it there. Ana couldn’t have put anything there because she was at Kempff, Hsang and Cowper before Jane and I went to Ana’s place. There were people at Kempff’s watching her all afternoon.”

“Yeah. But she could’ve called someone, got them to do it for her.”

“I thought you might be monitoring her phone. So I made her take the battery out straight after she called me. So you couldn’t track her. And when she got to Kempff’s they took her phone off her. She couldn’t use her phone, and she never used theirs.”

Curnow nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that figures. That leaves you, then.”

“Crap. It leaves you. I’m glad we’re getting on and all, but, you know, you’re a crook. Right? You’ve planted drugs on people before. You threatened to rape Ana. And you needed to get leverage on her Dad. Of course you planted the dope. What’s this even about?”

“I found those fucking drugs in that bitch’s floor. I know I didn’t put them there. Look, I said tidying up after killing you would be too much like work, because you’ve got stuff that points to me stashed all over the place.”

“With different people. You’d never get all of it before they started looking for you.” I hadn’t done anything like that. So long as he thought I would have, it didn’t matter.

“Let’s say. But d’you think you could protect Ana from me, if you piss me off more than you’re doing right now? Jane Siebel? Your Mom?”

Cops and probation officers often deal with the aftermath, when someone insults someone’s mother. It’s a matter of honour to go insane with rage. It always seemed a bit silly. “Ah, you don’t want to kill my Mom. It’d just be embarrassing, know what I mean?”

“Huhn.” He looked at me, not liking what he saw. “Horseshit. It wouldn’t be embarrassing. You want me to explain death to you? You want to have to explain it to your family? Stop pretending you’re not scared; you’re shit at it. Convince me that you didn’t put that dope there. Or else admit that you did.”

“Okay. Well, I can’t admit that I put it there, because I didn’t.” Then I thought about it. “Actually, I don’t think I can prove that, though. I’ve got nothing.”

Probation Officer #197: Endgames 6

Posted on April 10, 2014 by jaime

Curnow stretched and then relaxed, slouched on the couch while I sat in an armchair on the other side of the coffee table.

He said, “I wasn’t going to fuck that bitch, you know. I was just putting a scare into her.”

I said, “yeah,” as neutrally as I could. If I let it go too easily, or pretended I believed him, he’d get suspicious. I didn’t want to get him angry, either. I’d be a fool if I wasn’t scared of him. But also, I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted him to talk.

“You fuck her?”

“Not even going to answer that.” But I couldn’t stop myself from shaking my head.

“Yeah, yeah. You know, the boys thought you were fucking her. You were being such a white knight. But I knew you weren’t. You’re a faggot.”

I sighed. That wasn’t worth an answer either.

“Oh, now you’re feeling all righteous because I said faggot. Faggot. Faggot. Faggot. But I got nothing against faggots. Usually. But you, you’re just a faggot in every damn way. Course you wouldn’t fuck her. Your client.”

“Yuh. My client.” I held the tumbler to my mouth again, and tilted it.

Curnow looked at me. “You’re not drinking. You had whisky on your breath when you answered the door but you weren’t drunk. You’ve only played with your drink since, while you’ve been pouring me glasses. There was a photo of me taken while I was outside on your porch. It would’ve gone to a security company, wouldn’t be hard to find which. You sneaked a pic of me with your cell phone when I was in the corridor and sent it to someone. I guessing that lawyer bitch, Siv, Silver, Siebel. Jane Siebel, right?”

I inclined my head, neither yes nor no.

“So someone’s got proof I been inside the house. And now you’re trying to get me drunk. For fuck’s sake. Faggot, I’ll say what I’ve come to say quicker if you don’t waste time insulting my intelligence.”

I said nothing. We were both trained interviewers, so silence wasn’t going to be as powerful as it sometimes is. But I let it stretch on. Eventually he recognised the interrogator’s pause and chuckled. I laughed too.

“All right. I’m going to go working in security. Damn near three times the pay. I don’t really care that I got fired; I was going to quit anyway. So I don’t need to do anything to you. Killing you’d be easy, but you’re half clever and the covering up afterwards’d be a pain in the ass. Understand where I’m coming from?”

“No kill I.”

“That’s Star Trek, isn’t it? The one with the acid pizza that eats rocks and kills people.”

“‘Devil in the Dark’.”

“Jesus, you are a total fucking faggot.”

“Yeah. You’re not really hear to tell me something. If you were you’d have told me by now. You want to ask me something, and you want me to think it’s safe to answer you. So what do you want to know?”

“Good. You know that dope in that bitch’s room. That baggie of coke. That I got set up with, so it looked like I’d planted it. That was a brilliant sting, that, and I walked straight into it. Now, I know Jane Siebel wouldn’t do that. She’s got a bigger stick up her ass than you have. So did you put it there, or did that bitch put it there herself?”

Probation Officer #197: Endgames 5

Posted on April 9, 2014 by jaime

I wouldn’t have surprised if it had been a neighbour come to complain about the Samoan log drums. Still, as I’ve mentioned, they’re deaf.

There’s a moment in the Georg Solti recording of Siegfried where Siegfried strides through a wall of flames, and the Vienna Philharmonic is making a huge and wonderful racket about it, and you can still hear the Vienna Sophiensaal cat wandering amongst John Culshaw’s microphones and demanding to be fed. I’m wasting your time by mentioning this, I know, but my point is that the neighbours have stood for, or sat quietly knitting through, anything by way of noise.

Alternatively it could be someone popping round on the off-chance of having sex with the host. That happened often enough for me to consider the possibility. I hoped it’d be Jane Siberry, who I should have been chasing harder, and I feared it’d be Ana. I didn’t want to talk to Ana.

So I opened the door. It was Greg Curnow. He’d never been to my place before, but he was still a cop, even he was in the process of getting fired. Of course he’d know how to find me.

His shirt was free of his pants. But not his belly. Unfortunately, he was the fit kind of crooked cop. By way of greeting he said, “Cunt.”

He swayed a bit, but even drunk he could still take me. But once a second had passed I relaxed a little. He’d been trained, and he knew that his best chance for inflicting total damage on me, without my getting in any retaliation before I starting bleeding onto my carpet, was immediately the door opened. It hadn’t already happened, so it wasn’t his intention. I said, “‘Allo, cock”, in my best Dick van Dyke cockney.

He looked at me, puzzled. I shrugged. “Yeah, it’s funnier if you’ve seen Mary Poppins.”

He stared at me. “Seen what.”

He didn’t want to hear about Mary Poppins. I said, “I’ve got whisky. Want one?”

“One? Fat chance.”

Probation Officer #196: Endgames 4

Posted on April 8, 2014 by jaime

I was home. I’d written a long email to Sa’afia. She was married now. She’d sent me photos of the wedding. She looked beautiful, of course. There’d been a lot of absurdly handsome men and pretty women with parasols, wooden verandahs painted white, intensely green greenery, and tropical flowers. It looked like a good party.

I’d complimented her on her dress, and made a show of saying something nice about Paul, and then turned to safer subjects. There was something oddly haphazard about the way the houses were spaced, for example. Was that because they were built on communal land?

That gave Sa’afia something to write about, and so we talked. I wanted to ask her if she missed me, if she loved me, and if she wanted to come back, and I wanted to tell her I wanted her. If she said she wanted me, then I’d do what it took to have us together again. That was all I wanted to say, and I couldn’t say it. If she felt anything similar she couldn’t say it either.

So writing the emails hurt, at least at my end, and they said nothing of the things that mattered. I got back emails that didn’t tell me how she was. But they were all I could expect.

Te Waka Huia Choir

I put on Crowded House’s Together Alone, just the last, title track, with the Samoan log drummers and the Te Waka Huia Choir. The end, where the Samoan drummers and the Maori singers take over the track, still makes my hair lift at the back of my neck. Then I played it again, and swallowed a tumbler of whiskey.

Then I played it again, and poured more whiskey. But I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to get drunk, so I put the tumbler down again.

I was tempted to throw the tumblr at the wall. But the gesture only lasts a second, and then I’d have to face the fact that I liked the tumblr, I hated cleaning whiskey – or anything liquid – off rough surfaces, not to mention pulling tiny glass splinters out of my feet.

Then I said, “Ah, the fuck.” It was after ten. And someone had just knocked at my door.

Probation Officer #195: Engames 3

Posted on April 6, 2014 by jaime

By now I had more clients. There was Merick, who’d defrauded the company he worked with for a little over ten thousand dollars, which he’d blown on gambling. He was lucky, in a way, that he’d only worked for a kitchen products business. If he’d been able to get his hands on millions he’d have given it all to the on-line gaming companies just as surely and just as fast.

There was Tyree, who’d shot his father, non-fatally. I hadn’t talked to him yet.

There was Mo, who’d broken into a drug store in the early hours of the morning. He was so small he could fit between two of the roof panels, which hardly had to bend to admit him. He was so stupid that he didn’t know about movement sensors. He was so luckless that he found five dollars and seventy cents in the manager’s drawer, but didn’t find the safe. Not that he’d have been able to move it or open it. And so thoughtless that he’d stolen the manager’s half bottle of Irish whisky. If he’d left that alone, the manager probably wouldn’t have bothered to press charges. I could keep Mo out of jail, I expected. There was a girl who liked him, inexplicably enough, and he liked to be told what to do.

There was Effa, who turned tricks and wasn’t in trouble until she’d got her fourteen year old sister to work for her. Now she was in major trouble. At the time I still didn’t know just how much. I’d had one interview with her, and she’d spent a lot of it hitting her own head. That was alarming, but she was on worse trouble than that. Well, I’d find out. Someone put a bullet through the side of the Bedford, while I was driving it, because of Effa’s trouble.

But that happened much later.

I’d slowly built up a client list of thirty-five, so I was now as overworked as everybody else. There was no way I could see my clients once a week, or even once a fortnight, once I’d handled the ones who needed intensive help.

So I went through my client list. I sorted them into people I’d have to work with a lot. Then people I could see for an hour a week. Then people I could see fortnightly, and a few souls who were out of trouble and doing well, and I could reduce them to one appearance a month.

I arranged them into piles. At last I held Ana’s file, and weighed it in my hand. It was a thick, heavy file, but it hadn’t put on much weight lately. She’d stopped generating paperwork. If I put her onto monthly reporting, I’d only see her twice more before her probation was up.

I sat there with the file, feeling angry at Ana, and myself, and Sa’afia and, obscurely, at Minnie Mouse. “Fuck,” I said at last, “Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck.” Ana’s file landed on the monthly pile, span and came to rest.